Serpentine Scarves ᐧ 04 Coil

Serpentine Scarves is a capsule collection celebrating Lunar New Year 2025, the year of the wood snake. Created in thoughtful collaboration between slow fashion designers Joy Mao and Ryan Taylor, the limited collection features eight one-of-a-kind merino wool scarves, treated with a color-shifted natural dye.

Each scarf began with Joy, as an oversized white ribbon of 100% merino wool, manually knit on a hand-powered Silver Reed SK280 knitting machine. The knits themselves were intentionally patterned in an elegant full-needle rib construction that would give them their surprising weight and durability.

Once with Ryan, they were then treated to a bath of lac (kerria lacca): a deep burgundy-hued natural dye that has been extracted from the resinous shellac of scale insects since antiquity. Both makers then worked together to fold, twist, bunch, and bind each scarf with a different shibori-dye technique — in preparation for the final step of their journey: color-shifting. During this step, each piece was plunged into a bath of iron — the resulting alchemy transmuting the bright reds into deep purples, along and beyond the crinkles and twists of their binding. 

Read more about the process here.

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04 Coil:

A spine of lac-red is eroded by wrinkles of shifted-purple, reflecting the form that the scarf itself wants to take: to curve and coil with the infinite flexibility of its long form. 04 Coil thus sits with a certain contentedness around the shoulders of its wearer, as if doing what it was destined to do. 

Dimensions:  9" wide by 68" long

Materials:

• knit with 100% merino wool
• dyed with lac (kerria lacca)
• pre-mordanted with alum (aluminum potassium sulfate)
• post-mordanted with iron (ferrous acetate)

Care:

• gently wash by hand (or machine hand wash cycle) in cold water with a pH neutral detergent, lay flat to dry
• do not bleach
• do not dry clean (dry-cleaning solvents may damage natural dyes)
• gradations of hues and unevenness in dye uptake are intrinsic to the natural dye process
• naturally-dyed clothing may transfer color before the first wash or two; until then, avoid contact with light colored objects and surfaces